It is inevitable that over time seating areas, for example car seats get soiled. As is well known moisture, dirt and other materials on person can over time accumulate on a seat surface, impairing its aesthetic look, and even potentially resulting in unpleasant odors. This can especially be a problem for people who are active in sports, aerobics, and other activities who generally may have accumulated dirt from a playing field, or otherwise continue to perspire for a period of time after the end of the activity. For those people, getting into a car seat immediately after an activity can contribute significantly to the soiling of the seat surface.
There are a number of seat covers available on the market. However, many of them are limited in that they are either overly complicated, difficult to install, and/or inconvenient to store.
For example U.S. Pat. No. 7,210,738 (Mahaffy) describes a retractable seat back cover to prevent occupants of a rear seat in a vehicle from soiling the backside of a car seat.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,655,736 and 6,659,551 (Arenas) describe a retractable seat cushion and back cover system that is stowed underneath the front seat and can be pulled out to cover the seat prior to the occupant taking their place.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,382,720 (Franklin) also describes a retractable seat cover system that is mounted on the front of the car seat and which can be pulled out for deployment over a car seat cushion and back.
Each of these prior art examples suffers from notable limitations. First, each is relatively permanently mounted to the car seat. As a result, they lack the convenience of portability such that one effectively has to buy a seat cover system for each seat to be covered.
Similarly, they are all generally based on a concept analogous to a window blind, where the cover can be retracted into a housing when not in use, and then withdrawn from the housing when needed. In most people's experience with window blind mechanisms, they are not particularly convenient to operate, and the existence of a roller mechanism simply provides one more point of failure for the product, rendering it effectively unusable.
As well, none of these systems are particularly amenable to cleaning, so in effect the problem of soiling the car seat is not actually resolved, it is just a different installed component that accumulates the dirt, moisture and other undesirable constituents.